by Mark Bowden
But increasingly, the good doctor was encountering something new. A cynical virus had invaded paradise. Instead of the misty-eyed gaze of grateful respect he once got from repaired athletes, more and more he was getting looks that were outright skeptical and accusing. Increasingly, Dr. Vince was getting the cold shoulder—athletes publicly demanding second opinions before submitting to surgery or treatment, or flying out of town to be operated on by their own doctors. The truth was that Dr. Vince was as respected and admired as any doctor in his specialty, but gradually his official designation as team doctor began showing a dangerous new downside.
How do you think it looked when Randall, the most closely watched player on the team, chose to fly back out to California and put himself under the care of his own orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Clarence Shields, after being felled with a knee injury in the first game of the ’91 season? There was a growing list of players in the Eagles’ locker room who wouldn’t even consider placing themselves under Dr. Vince’s care, not because he was any less skillful with the knife, but because with so much riding on their career (and with cynical agents whispering in their ears), players no longer felt comfortable just placing their fate in the hands of Team.
Ben’s case was going to ably illustrate why.
HIS AGENT, Dick Bell, urged Ben to seek a second opinion. They lined up an appointment with a renowned specialist in Denver, and Bell even booked Ben a flight. But the knee was throbbing so badly on the day he was supposed to leave, Ben just skipped it. He was impatient to get the surgery done and get the healing process under way. Maybe he could beat the eleven months of rehab forecast by Dr. Vince and be ready to start the ’92 season. Seeing the second doctor in Denver would either confirm what he had already been told, or it would force him to make a decision—and, no doubt, mean further delays.
What was he going to do with himself if he couldn’t play football? Sure, he’d continue to get paid, but Ben had all the money he needed. He didn’t know what to do with all the money he had; in fact, it had created a whole set of problems in his life that he had never even imagined before. In that sense, Ben’s sudden success had been deeply disillusioning.
He’d started off enthusiastically, buying himself clothes, a car, the mandatory DHM in Macon, buying Doris a new car, buying Bennie Joe his own backhoe, giving away thousands of dollars to that huge extended family of his down in Houston County, paying off his college loans, purchasing insurance and paying his taxes … until he discovered, to his chagrin, that about half of his bonus was gone. Dick had helped him set the rest aside.
When it was all done, Ben came face-to-face with the fact that his life wasn’t all that much improved. Sure, he had things, a house, cars, clothes. He could take exotic vacations if he liked, but, when he really thought about it, he’d had more fun being penniless in college. The money he gave away didn’t make other people happy either. His mom didn’t like the DHM in Macon that much. It was a two-story structure with pillars in front like some kind of suburban echo of plantation life—didn’t suit her. His father was jealous of how lavish Ben had been with his mom. “She gets a house and a new car and I get a backhoe?” Bennie Joe complained, “I guess I’m used to being the underdog in this family.”
Like so many of his teammates, Ben found it difficult to go home. Many of his high-school friends were adrift and unemployed. Some of his classmates were already dead or in jail. Everybody wanted money. Ben, I got this great idea to start a business! Ben, I just need it for one car payment until my check comes through. Ben, we’re gonna lose the house if we don’t pay this bill. His uncle was in jail, arrested for armed robbery trying to keep up a crack habit. His disgruntled father was hard to be around—he still wouldn’t tolerate swearing or alcohol, so how could Ben invite a few of his old buddies over for a beer?
Ben himself had managed to emerge from one year of junior college and four years at Georgia with the literacy of a grade-schooler, although he was clearly intelligent and capable of learning almost anything—even a driven achiever when it came to football. But his ideas of what life held for him after retiring from the game consisted of a vague plan to build a big house on a lake and take kids fishing. It was easy to see why Ben quickly was possessed by one overriding impulse—fix the knee and get me back on the field.
He reported to Graduate Hospital on Friday, November 15, for six and a half hours of surgery by Dr. Vince, who replaced Ben’s anterior cruciate ligament with one from a cadaver and repaired all the other tears and breaks.
In the week he spent lying around the hospital, he was visited by only one of his teammates. Andre Waters stopped by to drink a beer with Ben and play Nintendo. Ben didn’t forget.
THE TROUBLE started about five months later, when the knee was feeling strong enough for Ben and the Eagles’ trainers to begin putting stress on the joint, trying to build it back up. It didn’t feel right. To Ben, apart from the pain, the joint felt wobbly.
“I don’t think this is supposed to be like this,” he complained to Otho, who assured him it wasn’t unusual at this point in rehab.
Otho had been around forever. A big, gruff man with a face that seemed one size too large, framed with dark hair, and accented by bushy dark eyebrows, Otho walked with a permanent lazy slouch and spoke with a low Texas drawl still intact after twenty-one years on the East Coast, first with the Baltimore Colts and then, since ’73, with the Eagles. Longevity like that was rare in football. Otho had seen whole generations of players, coaches, managers, and even owners come and go. He was a repository of down-home wisdom and NFL anecdotes and knew just about everybody who had ever worn pads and a helmet at this level. His lair, a suite of windowless rooms adjacent to the locker room and off-limits to all but those on the club payroll, was cluttered with massage tables, exercise equipment, relaxation devices (including a flotation chamber into which Otho once crawled and fell asleep, awakening late at night in an eerie, vacant stadium), workout charts, reference books, training schedules, tape, wraps, pads, orthopedic braces, shoe wedges, painkillers, needles, pills, and a positively legendary assortment of homespun ointments, balms, and potions that lent Otho an almost Merlinesque reputation for pasting football players back together and getting them back out on the field. A consummate yarn-spinner and practical joker, Otho was a gray eminence, not only with the Eagles, but throughout pro football, since many of the trainers working for other teams had served an apprenticeship with Otho or with someone else who had. In short, if Otho told Ben what he was feeling was normal, then, by God, who was going to argue with Merlin himself?
But at age fifty-eight, after more than a quarter century ministering to athletes, Otho was most definitely of the Old School when it came to sports injuries. Real men scoffed at pain. Although Otho and the other trainers on his staff knew enough not to encourage players to risk further damage to frayed limbs and swollen joints, they considered themselves frontline experts on what constituted a “playable” injury. Pain was part of the rehab process, too. An athlete in a hurry to repair a damaged joint couldn’t afford a painless rehab schedule (nor could the team, although insurers picked up the big paychecks of injured players). To a certain extent, the old ethic of playing with pain lived on most vigorously in the training room, where the idea was that real men regularly pushed their aching, surgically repaired body parts right up to the edge of human endurance in their determination to get back out on the field. By this standard, Ben was something less than a real man.
“It doesn’t feel right,” he kept complaining.
Part of Ben’s problem with the trainers predated the injury. He had always been something of a fussbudget with trainers. He’d come back to have his ankles or wrists retaped two and three times before a game, complaining that they didn’t feel just right. Little aches and pains would convince Ben he ought to skip practice, when Otho and the trainers knew damn well he could play— too good to practice. These were little more than annoying eccentricities so long as he was playing well.
; But once Ben became Otho’s ward, his attitude became a major problem. As the trainers saw it, one purpose in pushing the damaged joint through painful exercises was to break down the formation of scar tissue from the surgery, which was essential for regaining full range of motion and his old speed and agility. But to Ben, pain signaled danger. He wasn’t buying Otho’s strategy. So the team kept sending Ben back to Dr. Vince. In March ’92, the surgeon performed a follow-up arthroscopic examination and surgery, cleaning out some of the scar tissue himself. In another session, Dr. Vince sedated Ben and then vigorously manipulated the knee himself—a procedure the doctor and Otho felt a more dedicated player ought to be doing for himself. Despite these efforts, as summer approached, and the ’92 season, Ben was still complaining that the knee didn’t feel right.
It didn’t help having Randall working away like a rehab god right alongside him. Randall’s injury, while severe, had not been as extensive as Ben’s, and he was much further along in his recovery. The surgery with Dr. Shields had obviously gone well. Randall was King Fucking Rehab himself, running, lifting, jumping, getting measurably stronger every day—putting on a dazzling show for Otho and the boys, and saying helpful things to Ben like “You’ve got to want it” or “Time to get down to business.”
Ben could sense a showdown brewing. Hanging around on the fringes of a team minicamp in June, Ben told one of the hounds that he didn’t think his knee would be ready to play on until the ’93 season. Given that Richie and Harry, Otho, and Dr. Vince were all still projecting Ben’s return for early in the ’92 season, this was news. Asked about it, the club’s brass wasn’t about to budge.
“Ben is a young player who has never been through this before,” explained Richie. “So it’s not surprising that he gets discouraged. It’s not easy to work back from an injury like that. But Otho and the doctor still think he’s making good progress. We expect to have him back this season.”
That was the public line, anyway. Privately, the club was getting fed up with Ben. Dr. Vince said he wouldn’t get better until he started working harder with the knee. But the damn thing felt so unstable; Ben was convinced the knee was going to pop apart every time he put weight on it. The word “malingerer” was being whispered around— Ben was being tagged a gutless slacker. During training camp at West Chester, Ben was up in the dorm with everybody else. He had therapy every morning at 7:00 a.m., and then Otho would tell him to get out, run, push himself up and down the steep hills around the practice fields, and Ben tried, halfheartedly. When the trainers found him just idling around the practice field, they scowled and reported him to management. When Ben skipped a weekend therapy session, taking a break from training camp while the rest of the team was out of town for an exhibition game, the club fined him $3,000. By midsummer, the team was considering taking Ben’s case to the league’s management council and trying to get released from his contract. If he refused to work himself back into playing shape, they could refuse to pay him his salary. Nobody confronted Ben directly, but he heard the whispers around the locker room and on the practice field—won’t work, poor work ethic, won’t take advice, coward … doesn’t want to play.
Doesn’t want to play?
Ben had gone into a long depression the previous winter after the knee surgery. He was a lost soul. He stayed home playing Nintendo all day and went out drinking at night. He would lie in bed until noon and then roll over and play video games until his eyes started to blur. His appetite went away, and he dropped nearly thirty pounds from his once-impressive frame. Gaunt, big-eyed, his head shaved, Ben showed up in the Eagles’ locker room late in the ’91 season looking so bad it frightened some of his teammates and friends. To the Pack, he had been transformed from a cocky, muscular millionaire athlete into a frail, insecure teenager. He was, of course, a ghost, no longer a member of the family of Team, cut off from his family and friends back home (his mother was afraid to fly, so she couldn’t come up to be with him, and his father was always working). Ben watched the Eagles games on TV, and when the announcers sang the praises of the team’s number-one-ranked defense, or mentioned the temporary absence of this or that key player, the name Ben Smith never came up. He had started ten games for that number-one-ranked defense in ’91, yet it was as though he didn’t exist! He felt as if he had not only lost his future, but his past.
Ben had weathered all that. He had bulked himself back up and regained the cocky twinkle in his eyes. It hadn’t been easy. And the club thought he didn’t want to play?
It came to a head at the end of summer, when Dr. Vince and Otho acknowledged that the knee was still loose, but that it was strong enough. They suggested that he tape the knee, brace it, and try running on it. How else were they going to find out what he could do? To Ben, the “suggestion” had the ring of ultimatum.
He said no.
“Somebody is going to tell me what’s wrong with my knee,” he said. “Y’all do what you’re gonna do; I’m gonna talk to my agent.”
When the Eagles’ pass defense started to slip so badly in Kansas City, Bud Carson kept trying to patch the weak spot on the left corner. After Izel Jenkins was repeatedly burned, he inserted Otis Smith and then John Booty, with similar results. Waiting anxiously on the sidelines was rookie Mark McMillian, but the kid was only five-seven and as green as the color on his uniform. Bud didn’t dare just throw Mark in. The locker-room chorus became “Where’s Ben?” Hadn’t Dr. Vince and Otho projected his return for October of ’92? Here it was almost November!
Ben was on the road with his agent, for three independent evaluations of his still-wobbly knee.
The first was with Dr. Michael Fagenbaum, a noted orthopedic surgeon in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fagenbaum took about ten minutes to examine and assess the progress of Ben’s knee and pronounced a stunning verdict.
“I can’t see you playing on this again.”
According to Fagenbaum, the donor anterior cruciate ligament had not taken properly (which happens in a certain percentage of these surgeries), and as a result the medial collateral ligament was unstable. As Ben and his agent understood it, if Ben played on it, the knee would almost certainly be seriously reinjured, and the question would no longer be one of playing pro cornerback, but of walking.
Fagenbaum said he could take it apart and put it back together, but the chances of Ben’s being able to regain anything like his former speed and agility were only fifty-fifty.
“Let’s not panic,” cautioned Bell to his stricken client. “We’ve already learned that different doctors can have different opinions. Let’s see what the other ones say before we panic.”
“But, Dick, why would he say that?” Ben was distraught.
Next they flew to Atlanta, to consult with Dr. Blaine Woodfin, another noted orthopedist.
Woodfin examined and tested Ben’s left knee, and, as Bell remembered it, pronounced Dr. Vince’s surgery a “failure.” He agreed with Fagenbaum’s assessment of the problem, but held out slightly more hope. Woodfin said he could reconstruct the knee himself, and Ben had a good chance of playing again, but there were no guarantees. He gave better odds. Woodfin said there was an 85 percent chance he could get Ben’s knee back in playing shape.
Next they flew out to see Dr. Shields, whom Ben had been eager to see after witnessing Randall’s miraculous resurrection. And the California surgeon, the first black doctor Ben had consulted, just swept the nervous young athlete off his feet.
“This is what we have to do,” said Shields, confidently, reassuringly. He explained how he would repair the damage. “You’ll be fine,” he told Ben. “Don’t worry about a thing. You’re gonna play football and you’re gonna play corner again.”
They scheduled the resurgery for December.
Ben and his agent were furious with Otho, Dr. Vince, and the Eagles. No one was seriously questioning Dr. Vince’s surgical skills (though Eagles players now began to eye him with unjustified apprehension). It was a given that knee repairs were tricky, and that they didn�
�t always work out. What surgeon could guarantee total success every time? But for months Ben had been complaining that things weren’t right, and all he’d gotten in response was whispered scorn, threats, a fine, and an ultimatum … to do what? All three independent doctors felt playing on the knee without further repairs would have been disastrous—Ben would almost certainly have blown it and his career. Of course, their opinions were no more valid than Dr. Vince’s. Chances are, all three were wrong. Dr. Shields and Otho had easily seen and worked with as many or more injured knees than the other doctors. But for Ben, judging by the way the knee felt, there was no question who was right. The way he saw it, Dr. Vince’s surgery had failed to restore the knee—Ben could feel that! And then, either out of incompetence or out of some misguided refusal to admit he was wrong, he had urged Ben to play on it. For months he had endured suspicions that he was shirking rehab, that he didn’t want to play anymore. Now he felt completely vindicated, and angry.
The only scientific measure of the joint’s stability, and this was hardly the last word among experts, was provided by a machine called a KT/1000 that ranks tension in the joint on a millimeter scale—the lower the number, the more stable the knee. Any knee loose enough to be ranked over 3.5 millimeters is considered a candidate for reconstruction. Woodfin’s measure of Ben’s knee was 6.5 millimeters! Why hadn’t Dr. Vince used the KT/1000? What was more important, pushing him back out on the field or making sure the knee was fully healed? So much for the team doctor!
